Golden gardeners don't let age stop them

Helen Bordeaux, Duane Heward and Mary Fitzgerald sat in the living room recently of one of the patio homes at Lutheran Hillside Village senior housing complex and talked about gardening — recollections from more than 50 years of experience.

Their discussion underscores the theme that loss may be part of aging, but gardening can evolve and continue through every decade of life.

"Gardening helps people retain a connection with the environment, retain that rhythm of life," said Bob Streitmatter, manager of Luthy Botanical Garden, part of the Peoria Park District.

"Gardening is important for everyone, but especially for the elderly. There are many hidden virtues in gardening. It doesn’t have to be on a grand scale. It can be one or two pots of plants on a patio or outside a window."

At Lutheran Hillside Village, the role of gardening is integrated into all aspects of the 40-acre campus.

"Gardens and gardening is a priority," said Rick Gorrie, director of facility services at Hillside Village. "Members of our garden advisory committee may not all contribute physically, but their recommendations can be seen in our grounds."

Bordeaux, 82, grew up in a Chicago apartment. Her first taste of gardening came after moving to Peoria and needing an outlet from her five children.

Heward, 77, grew up in Mineral outside of Princeton and began gardening with grandparents.

Fitzgerald, 78, moved around a lot as a child with her parents, who were sharecroppers. The first thing they did at each new home was clean up the yard and plant a garden.

Together Bordeaux, Heward and Fitzgerald conservatively represent a combined 150 years of gardening experience. They each have gardening tips, favorite plants and tales of gardens past and present.

Add Merwyn French to the equation and their combined experience exceeds two centuries. These four members of the garden advisory committee are all actively involved in projects on the Hillside Village grounds.

Heward said he took a potted tomato to a friend in the assisted living complex. Heward said his friend may need help tending the plant, but the benefit will still be there.

Streitmatter said, "Gardening is a lifetime activity. It changes with age, but the benefits are always there. I’ve given dozens of presentations at nursing homes and assisted living facilities about the concept of a healing garden."

In agreement with Streitmatter is Genny Gibbs, horticulture technician at Illinois Central College, who said, "Especially when people are more confined to the indoors, gardens, even just viewed from inside, give a spark of life."

The healing quality of a garden is evidenced in the stories told by Heward, Fitzgerald and Bordeaux.

"I’ve been a gardener for a long, long time. It’s hard to resist planting, even when the body tells you to slow down," Bordeaux said.

"I just don’t have the energy levels I used to, but I’m a long time member of the Peoria Garden Club and always encourage people to plant something."

Touring the gardens around Bordeaux’s patio home, it’s hard to conclude she’s running out of energy. Some of her favorite plants are peonies that were from the garden of her husband Hank’s great grandparents — "200-year-old peony plants," she said.

Gorrie said the facility encourages residents to garden in their own or community garden plots.

French, 81, is a retired farmer from Nebraska where he had more than 1,000 acres under irrigation. At Hillside Village, he organizes the community garden in the center of the complex with 13 plots bordered with flowers. On one side are 150 tomato plants, the bounty of which French contributes to the main dining hall. He also has a system of five-gallon plastic buckets hanging from a pipe with tomato plants protruding from the bottoms.

Bordeaux said with his background in Nebraska farmland, French is used to productivity in every parcel of land. As a master gardener and floral arranger, Bordeaux is more oriented to the aesthetics of gardening. Her entire plot in the community garden is filled with a profusion of zinnias.

"I can trade flowers for vegetables," she said.

In a nearby patio home, Liz Jelly’s gardens climb into the river bluff. Just south of her gardens is a meadow of wildflowers planted several years ago.

Jelly and her husband moved into their patio home seven years ago and started cleaning garbage out of the underbrush and pushing hostas and wildflowers up the hillside.

Bordeaux said, "Gardening is a basis for a shared activity. I’m a gregarious person, but over the process of aging, that sometimes leaves you. Gardening is an opportunity to regain some of those connections with people."

Connections with people are evident in her 200-year-old peony stock that links her with her husband’s great grandparents and in her lush climbing clematis vine, which clings to pieces of old oxygen tubing used by her husband Hank Bordeaux before he died Nov. 13, 2006, after 59 years of marriage.

"The tubing is strong, gentle and invisible," she said, pausing only briefly to comment on the apparatus. Then she continued touring her garden, but she’d reinforced her point that gardening is a connection with people and the rhythm of life.

Clare Howard can be reached at (309) 686-3250 or choward@pjstar.com.

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